Having my way with Ulysses

Car Ride

• Wilderness

Free from the I and Mine, from agression, arrogance, greed, desire, and anger, he is fit for the state of absolute freedom. Serene in this state of freedom, beyond desire and sorrow, seeing all beings as equal, he attains true devotion to me. By devotion he comes to realize the meaning of my infinite vastness; when he knows who I truly am, he instantly enters my being.11:32 am

I don’t care.  I said what I said and I was right too.  Now I’d better calm down because we’ll get there soon and she’ll be grieving.  And I’ll help her.  I can save her, sort out her insurance and she’ll be grateful. She’ll say she couldn’t imagine what she would have done without me.  She’ll say thank you.  She’ll say are you blue? Who the hell are you?

Krishna:  Me?  I’m  Krishna.  I’ll be your driver.

What the hell is happening?  Did everything just stop?  What’s going on?

Krishna:  I changed the now moment.  You are used to a, what’s that word?  Kinch, a knife blade.  A now infinitely thin separating past from future.  I gave the now extension without duration.

What does that mean?  It’s like you pressed a pause button or something.

Krishna:  Ok.  If that works for you.  I paused time.

What?  Why?

Krishna:  Because you need help.  You are headed for a fall of your own creation.  You are laboring under an illusion and I’m here to tell you that creation leads to dissolution and back again.  And again.  That’s how it goes.

Look.  Help me out here.  I’m just going to see a widow to help her through a life insurance issue.  Goodness of my heart.  Change her future for the better.

Krishna:  Right.  Purely altruistic.  I see you.  I can see that you are performing this action with the expectation of a particular outcome.  A particularly flattering to you outcome.  I’m saying let it go.  Help the woman, go ahead.  But stop thinking about what may result from it.  Do your duty and let it go.

But looking down the road for her, her prospects

Krishna:  What road?  There is no road.  There’s no now and later.  Time is static, man.  It does not have uni-directional flow.  It can’t be perceived, just inferred from motion and change.

No.  I’m not going to listen to some blue man groupie.  You’re the driver?  Then drive on buddy.  I have a widow to visit.  Are you sticking your tongue out at me?  Wait, weren’t you a guy?  Who are you now?

The rich incrustations of time

• Cyclops

he spat in careful convertedness a musaic dispensation about his hearthstone, if you please (Irish saliva, mawshe dho hole, but would a respectable prominently connected fellow of Iro-European ascendances with welldressed ideas who knew the correct thing such as Mr Shallwesigh or Mr Shallwelaugh expectorate after such a callous fashiion, no thank yous! when he had his belcher spuckertuck in his pucket, pthuck?)

5:51 pm

Sedimentary reality — that’s history.  Do you see?  History is made from memory, and the memories that make history, the ones that stick, the ones that calcify, you know the ones, the ones that start out as shifting sands until they become mineral accretions on our bodies, oh where to what to.  I’ll stand to say it.  The memories that make history are the ones compressed into our souls through force, through hatred, through persecution.  All the history of the world is full of it.  Persecution, injustice.  Look at your self.  Train your eye on yourself.  What is your nation?  And what about your race? What are these worlds?  Where dyoublong?  You think, you think, you think history is what was when?  It happened then?  Over there?  Back before whatchuyoucallitwhen?  No.  There is no over there back when.  It’s here now.  Now.  Right now.  This very moment.  This very instant.  Look, the hatred, the injustice, you think that goes away?  It hardens and sticks.  It creates layers all over the place.  Layers right here now, all over us.  Everywhere.  And it persists.  I don’t mean extension in time, no.  There’s no line here from then to when.  I’m saying it is all right here now persisting.  Calcifying.  Barnacling.  Do you see?  Force, hatred, injustice, history.  Insult.  History.  That’s history.  That’s history.  And it’s no way to live.  No life.  You can’t.  You can’t.  But you know it’s no use to stand up to hatred.  Hatred collects and and and it shifts, and it compacts and compresses and it calcifies into memory.  And then it becomes history.  That’s how it happens.  The layers become reality.  Sedimentary reality.  The real built on shifting sands, until it creates a nice hard surface.  No standing up to that.  It’s the opposite of that is life.  It’s.  Oh, what is it?  That world everybody knows.  You know it, don’t you.

What are the wild waves saying?

• Sirens

The glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth. 4:30 pm

Armonioso

 

Stop.  Do you see the woman with the seashell?  She’s pretending to hear the ocean in a shell, holding it to the man’s ear.  He’s pretending too.  She found the shell with a gentleman friend she tells her gentleman friend.  Perfect tempo.  They are listening to their own blood moving, an echo in a kind of retrospective arrangement.  The corpuscles moving nicely in the man now.  There’s blood in the water.  Competition: a perfect chord. She’s doing well. Hiding her ears with seaweed hair, exposing to place the shell, now hiding again.  Neck: brief exposure.  Her proportions perfect, he speaks, she waits, speaks.  All done in precise phi ratios.  The ratio of the F holes to the violin’s upper and lower pins, the ratio of the woman’s waist to her hips, the ratio of perfect mathematical harmonies in a scale, the ratio of his desire to hers, yes, that’s the important one, as it moves through time.  She calculates nicely the ratio of her eyes above the sheet to the face remaining hidden, the speed of her corpuscles to his.  Patience and timing.  Rhythm.  Like waves on a beach.  She knows her business now.  Lean in baby, mathematically you could be much closer.

Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial.

• Sirens

Be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.4:21 pm

Penseroso

Mathematics is not arithmetic.  Is that what you thought?  Oh my darling.  Arithmetic is  2*2/2=1+1.  That’s just juggling numbers.  But please, my delightful, look around you.  Go ahead.  light on something.  That is not a something, that is a collection of number in relationships, in patterns, whispering the universal language.  Some people, eccentrics mostly bless their hearts, think God is an external force.  Now I know my dear that you know better.  God is universal harmony perceived through number.  And if God is this universal harmony perceived through number, and play along, then time is the soul of God.  But don’t listen to me, who am I?  I am only God.  Listen to this:

 

Hear that?  Numbers.  Music is the voice of mathematics.  Go look in the mirror (haven’t we done this before?) and open your mouth wide.  Look in there, all the way in.  Two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than all others: the human voice.  Vibrate those little silky strings and out comes number.  Double that number and there you are, one octave higher.  Divide it in half, one octave lower.  An octave is the sound of the number 2.  Divide by 3 and you get the musical fifth, the fifth note on the scale.  Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink.  Quite.  Octaves and fifths love to make love.  Men and women, when left undisturbed, naturally sing a 5th apart.  Harmonious.  The number 4 = 2*2 = the second octave.  The number 5 is the musical third  (Pat.  Glorious that symmetry under the cemetery wall).   Bald Pat Quite: a chord.  You want a little dissonance?  Try the numbers 7, 11, and 13.  Heavy mojo in those numbers.  I don’t even want to tell you about the number 20. Want to get a little irrational?  Play the strings.  Guitar frets are placed according to the 12th root of 2.  Oh the numbers.  Durations of notes have ratios too.  And now we get into geometry.  Oh my beauteous ones.  If I could only tell you.  Or show you.  Or sing you.  Or touch you.  Or taste you.  If only.  Then I will never leave you.  And you will never leave me.  We can entwine in mathematical harmonies and whisper eternality into each other’s vibrating tympanic membranes.  You will weave patterns with your body and look in triangular mirrors.  But then you will see God and leave me to suffer.  Snivel.  Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing.  Wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:’d.

The bright stars fade

• Sirens

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.... Ah, mortal! then be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

4:00 pm

Rallentando

They have the same effect on all of them.  Lure them in, smile, make them think they’re the only pebble on the beach.  Screaming laughter after they’ve gone.  God bless my deaf ears.  Those two Delilah’s in there don’t realize that they’ll be old crones soon enough.  Beauty fades, and fast.  Sucker them in, girls, better land one before he he he realizes what you are about.  Then God’s curse on the bitch’s bastard.  Ruffled their feathers it did, that that kid piano tuner, blind as he is, paid them no notice at all.  Proved their invisibility to them.  They don’t exist unless they think they have a man wanting whatever beauty they possess under those scales.  Play a man like a fiddle.  Look at Kennedy there, ignoring that one for all she’s worth.  That’s an art, boys, that takes some skill.  Drives them wild every damn time.  She knows what they want.  And that other one stretching over him with the clocks on his socks sipping that violet syrupy nonsense.  He’s a male version of them getting Doce’s best show, snapping her bra, ringing in the hour.  Let’s hear the time.  Twelve men a day or she’s not happy.  Flatter them, then cling with chipped talons and devour them whole.  Maneaters.  Customers coming in, two, middling in age.  They’ll take a table with a view: want to see, not be seen.  Married, likely.  They’ll watch and won’t realize their own deafness until they leave.  Poor bastards.  They’ll hear the music, though, and why not?  They have memory and anticipation, same as you.  Same as me.  I hear it.  I hear the music all the time: voiceless songs sung from within.  Sometimes I go for the old slow blues numbers: Ray Charles in the day; Eartha Kitt, Miss Kitt to you.  When I want to pick it up a bit I hear the big bands.  Benny Goodman and his orchestra doing Sing Sing Sing.  In my mind, mind.  I expect; I remember.  Feeling a little allegretto.  Going to run some Louis Prima between my ears for a while.

 

You’re bothering me.  Get out of my head, I have customers to serve.

I knows

• Sirens

Hey Virgin Mary, lover of lovers / Hey Virgin Mary, how many others / Hey Virgin Mary, your bed is never empty / Hey Virgin Mary, it must bring you plenty.

3:52 pm

Devoto

Come to me.  Come on now, let me get that speck out of your eye.  Let mama take care of you.  Over here my baby.  What’s that you gathering, figs?  From thorns?  Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to do that?  Don’t worry, pobre, let mama have you now.  I’ve had my eye on you baby.  On your other eye.  I saw you poking your nose up under those statues.  Trying to get in there with your goggle eye.  Your eye, your nose.  But you got caught by that young little punk ass motherfucker.  Oh did I shock you?  It’s the company I keep.  O the saints above me!  And the ones behind me too.  I feel all wet just watching your reaction.  You remind me of Nannetti’s father, turning me upside down to have a look under my blue robe.  He made money selling my body: religion pays.  Oh you look delicious.  You want mama to shock you a little more?  Not yet.  Eat first.  Have some sweets of sin for mama (for Raoul) then you can stick your nose up my blue robe, white under, purple silk petticoats under that.  Listen.  4:00 is coming, baby, you know what that means.  Clockhands are turning.  Time ever passing.

Decoy. Soft Word. But look: the bright stars fade.

• Sirens

No life on earth can be hid from our dreaming.3:45 pm

[Scene: Lidia Doce y Mina Kennedy are hiding behind their bar counter drinking maté]
 
Allegretto
 

Lidia Doce:  Carajo como jodes!  What the hell’d you do that for?

Mina Kennedy:  Is that really a sunburn?  You just look darker brown.

Lidia:  Yes it’s a goddamn sunburn, what do you think?

Mina:  I don’t know, you just don’t look very red.  Oh wait, those are blisters.

Lidia:  Estupida gringa.  Burns only look red on pink people.  Hands to yourself.  Now, let’s pick some music, lure them into our green mirror.  Maybe some old chicha or cumbia, or reggaeton?

Mina:  More of that Peruvian crap?  Maybe later.  How about this:

 

Lidia:  Why this?  Purple.  What does purple have to do with anything?

Mina:  Nothing.

Lidia:  Perfect.  Anything, nothing, doesn’t matter.  We’ll say what we’ll say.

Mina:  Right.  The material is immaterial.  Besides, if you want purple, look around.  Look out that window:  Ned Lambert, Maginni, Boylan, Molly’s garters.

Lidia:  You been looking up her dress?

Mina:  Of course.  I look everywhere.  So do you.

Lidia:  Fine.  Fair enough.  I don’t even know what the damn song is about but whatever, we’ll use it.  Ok.  So.  Yeah.  Ha.   4/4 time signature.  Simple, common, and imperfect.  Perfect.

Mina:  We’ll divide it into 16 parts, obviously.

Lidia:  Obviously.  La la la la la lah.

Mina:  Then we stretch it, say 16 days.  Symmetry.  See what that gets us.

Lidia:  How does that get us anything?  Your helmet blocking your brain?

Mina:  It’s a matter of time.

Lidia:  That’s better.  Tempo.  Let’s tell some time.  And Mina, try to look human this time.  We don’t want them knowing we’re.

Mina: Yeah, no we don’t.

Lidia:  Ready?  Cleave!

Alltimesticking

• The Wandering Rocks

The fact is that I am unique. I am not interested in what one man may transmit to other men; like the philosopher, I think that nothing is communicable by the art of writing.You go first.  You go.  OK I’ll go.  Appearance and prompt responsiveness is the key. No, that’s too many words.  That’s not the key.  And then what?  Keep it the same every time?  Please.  And, and, and listen to me: who has the prior claim makes no difference. Were we born yesterday?  Were here now baby and this now has new rules.  Look, a child is born every minute through their usual window.  D’ya see?  They’ll all get short shrift and a long day, or otherwise be delayed or arrested altogether.  When? I’d say somewhen around blue o’clock in the morning.  And if kind fate but will if it so be it might be.  But here’s the beat to hear: turn now on.  Pay attention now!  And another thing, as an aside, really, not to worry too much or anything that we might be straying off topic, I don’t know but I’ve been wondering anyway as I’m sure you have too, does she ever put on pants?  Maybe in ten years.  Ok focus.  Turn now on.  Now.  How?  It would take a stretching of the nothingness between full moments.  Wait awhile.  Dont shave linear time just because of crashing lack.  Well, you’ll be sorry when it dawns on you. You are impatient; you give up waiting.  I say count something and wait.  A child is born every minute, how much time could it possibly take?  I’ll force you if you’re willing.  Or whatever.  We could just dump the ashes and note the time and coordinates because this shit will knock you into the middle of next week.  Wait.  Give me a minute, I’m smelling into the future.  I know.  I could walk the earth until I find a rent in its flesh. There’s a story.  Would you like that?  Well, what do you want to read?  Not our usual dinner: once upon a time and every day until one day and because of this and because of this until finally and ever since that day.  Excretion!  Here’s some advice.  Don’t listen to advice.  But advice comes in late.  The timing is off.  Something is out of joint.  Basta!  Enough!  Done.  Begin.  Let’s do some riffing now and see if we can’t get a little funky.

Seems a long way off.

• The Wandering Rocks

The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament.

No-one is anything.  I am a ghost.  Well, I haven’t died yet, no need to look at me as if my mind is off in some happy hunting ground somewhere.  I mean I have moved to an atemporal state without ever having died.  This is not resurrection, not metempsychosis.  I have translated.  You’ve done this too, occasionally.  You’ve lost track of time, before, yes?  That can happen when your world speeds up, when so much is happening that the whirlwind around you speeds time forward until you say you were so busy, had so much fun, were so distracted with it all, there was so much, so much, that time took flight.  This is not translation.  Translation comes from a deliberate slowness.  A stretching of the nothingness between full moments.  A pulling apart of discreet events until you inhabit the eventlessness between.  Time cannot reach you there.  Try it again, you’ve done it before.  You might make it happen for short spaces of time, short times of space with practice.  Like a muscle, the more you use it, the more supple, the more pliant.  Begin by cultivating your vision.  Practice seeing without seeing:  use your unseeing eye.  It helps to develop an idée fixe.  Find something with symbolic power.  For me it is chess.  Ah chess.  It contains the entire universe.  All of being and non-being, ever facet of the soul and the spaces between the facets beautifully composed onto 64 white and black squares.  I found chess in America.  I went after an American war to purchase land cheap, thinking I would grow cotton.  Instead I grew peaches.  Peach trees need little care.  Plant them, they blossom, then they grow.  Then peaches.  All they ask is we permit their becoming by staying clear of their being.  Then one harvest and endless solitude.  While my trees grew in Alabama I went to Atlanta and played chess.  The beauty, the harmony, of Zarathustra’s great invention!  In chess our adversaries move according to our moves, and we to them.  We form a helix coiling in a beautiful deadly dance, a rhythm of infinite possibilities.  64 squares, 8 X 8, infinity times infinity.  8 is the number of judgement.  And 64, 6+4=10, the perfect number.  The first triangular number to have a center, and the only one whose center is half of its total.  Balance.  GOD MEND THINE EVERY FLAW!  A onelegged sailor with an idée fixe crutched angrily, translating himself from the sidewalk into a jagged alley.  CONFIRM THY SOUL IN SELF CONTROL!  Symmetry.  The number of the soul.  10 represents the wheel of destiny and of retribution.  This is the number that governs returns, reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis, and most especially translation.  Judgement in delicious tango with destiny.  Ponder it, hang your gaze over a chessboard, and you can translate into a ghostbright existence where nothing is wanting, nothing is required, and the only fear is the hell of dreaded stalemate.  And the joy!  The joy of creation!  Each game a new universe.  Each chess problem (oh the composition of chess problems!) a microcosm of temporal harmony.  Each piece on the board a representative of stillness and force.  I left America, and the glorious atemporality I found there, to become a politician in support of my younger brother.  I was his pawn in a greater cause.  We are all pawns in a greater cause.  Just what is the cause, well that is not the pawn’s business.  Pawn’s have to earn their power, to kill, to rule as Queen; that is the glory of being a pawn.  Most remain powerless.  We serve our purpose quietly, in a waking sleep, then translate to the side to await our next use.  The halls of government contain chess rooms and in my political service to my brother I played chess.  I spoke on record 13 times in five years.  My brother hated and feared the number 13 although I found it immensely satisfying to open my mouth and make 13 utterances, speak questions I didn’t care to have answered, and then stop altogether.  I played chess.  I play chess.  I thought to master it and instead learned that my salvation, my translation to the infinite, comes when chess masters me.  Elijah is coming!  Elijah, a crumpled throwaway, sails closer to the three masters, bound to its translation.

And what star is that, Poldy?

• The Wandering Rocks

Money is indeterminate, it is everything, a kind of general equivalent, it is nothing, a kind of blank meaning. Information, as blank meaning, is in the process of taking its place, as a general equivalent.Rochford is Boylan with impatience for me to show Blazes his bit of code when I see him later.  I’ll sound him out.  This is it, whatever sense you want to make out of it:  010101000111010101110010011011100010000001001110011011110111011100100000010011110110111000100000001010000111000001100001011110010010000001100001011101000111010001100101011011100111010001101001011011110110111000100000011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000110111001101111011101110010111000101001 Richie Goulding on financial business for Goulding, Collis and Ward walked blindly toward a woman no longer young, smiling, as she rushed, fully absorbed, toward him, on her way from superior courtroom W-331 to courtroom E-173.  Money to be made, Tom says, telling people what they see now.  Label the now and they’ll enjoy it more.  Augment that reality.  From Boeing Field, a string of stretch suv’s, one bearing flags, made its way toward the freeway.   Maybe money there but I’ll get mine some other how.  I have my methods.  He’s a hero, Tom, you know that?  Saved somebody stuck down a manhole, the one just down there under the poster of that dauby chick with the yellow hair.  Poor devil stuck halfway to hell choking to death on sewer fumes and down went Tom, tied a rope around him and up they hauled them both.  The act of a real hero.  Ambulance.  Can’t hear myself type.  Anyway, the race is on soon.  Bantam Lyons is putting everything he’s got on a horse somebody gave him that hasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell.  McCoy kept himself out of it.  I can take my time; she doesn’t need these steaks yet.  I don’t think he appreciated my story about that dinner at Glencree either; he has some kind of feeling for Bloom maybe.  Says his wife sang there but did she?  Come on.  She a star?  Please.  The bright stars fade. Anyway, it was blue o’clock in the morning when we left with the car top down and I sat next to Bloom’s wife trying to get her top down.  Unfurnished Apartments, picked up and placed again on the window sash.  Bloom playing the astronomer pointing out this comet and that comet and stars and stars.  Left me to pay attention to his wife’s moon.  What star is that Poldy, she said.  Just a pinprick, needle dick.  He’s all right, though, Bloom.